Sherman tanks at Trinity Site

There were two Sherman tanks that were used at the Trinity site in New Mexico after the first atomic test in '45. They were loaded with lead plate and carried oxygen tanks etc. They were driven onto ground zero to take samples soon after the blast.
Obviously since they were operating in a dirty environment they would have also become covered in dust, sand and dirt and so also, would have become contaminated.
What happened to them afterwards????
Were they buried onsite somewhere and now forgotten?
Were they transported out to Nevada and buried? (Seems like a rather dodgy thing to do as there wasn't a railhead that close by)
Were they cut up onsite and then disposed of?
No one seems to actually know. Given the time, I would think that they were buried onsite around the time that the crater itself was bulldozed.

 

Hi Pete,
The Trinity Shermans have intrigued me for a while, but I'm afraid I've found little enough more about them myself in 3.5 years of casual looking.
I could quote myself from another place, but it's probably easier just to link to the little thread there which has a few gathered photos and what sketchy information has turned up so far from the web (you've reminded me that I'm overdue another Google on them) :
Trinity Sherman - World War 2 Talk
It doesn't answer the question, but there's a decent picture or two. I'd guess you were right that they were buried somewhere eventually.
Do keep in touch if you find out more on this little lead-lined niche.

Cheers,
Adam.

 

Since they were exposed to radiation, I expect they mutated into strange new forms and began to terrorise humanity. Subsequently they were destroyed by a brave young scientist and his cute girlfriend-assistant.

Thereafter, the whole episode was hushed up by the government, and that's why we have no information.

 

How do you think the Transformers came about lads?

 

Hi Adam!
Thanks for the link, it was nice to have a pic of the other tank. These just might be some future archeological artifacts! Over the years there were a couple of other sites that dealt with atomic testing and Trinity that I have visited and the surprising thing about them was that none of the members had even wondered about the two tanks final disposition! Lots of talk about Jumbo, the ranch, the crater, etc...but no one seems to know anything about the tanks. They had to have been trucked in from either a nearby base or a railhead. I don't know if they were fitted with lead after arrival, but I would assume so.
My thoughts about onsite burial would be that being somewhat radioactive, I can't see them being returned to service. I don't know if the combined weight of the tank and lead shielding would allow it to be carried on a tank transporter for burial elsewhere. Cutting them up would have been a huge chore prior to transport or onsite burial with the things being radioactive. Nevada Test Site was a few years away from being set up for atomic testing, so even if they were moved up there later for disposal they would have been sitting around for a few years till then. Some of the aircraft that were exposed to blasts at NTS in the 50s were left to 'cool' and have made it into the warbird arena, so I am assuming that the tanks were left to 'cool' and due to the trouble in transporting them, were buried onsite at the same time that the crate was bulldozed.

 

Of course, on the other hand, they may have simply been cut up into razor blades and as Sentinal says, they mutated and became the multiblade razors of today!

 

I'd still like to see that document "a special Sherman tank, described in LA-356" as mentioned here:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/lib-www/la-pubs/00191451.pdf

You never know, it may mention disposal... but it also may be rather secret still.
I imagine America has more than a few big holes packed full of Radioactive detritus scattered about, many of which may be quite capable of swallowing up a tank or two.

 

found this statement on flicker .com.re tanks... fact or fiction? no idea.

Quote.."My dad was stationed at Kirtland AFB (Albuquerque) New Mexico in the late 40's. He claims there were two of these at a salvage yard there and they were sold as scrap".

 

I could believe this! Location of Kirtland seems logical, late 40 or early 50s...maybe long enough to 'cool' off (I don't know, would have thought a bit longer...but maybe not) and the fact that some of the planes that were at the NTS were later sold off, well I guess the tanks could too.
A pity though, they would have made some interesting museum pieces.

 

glad to have helped, the planes! I did read that part too. so could be factual, perhaps not the ending you were hoping to find? regards, ray..

 

Thinking of the Shermans from the Trinity site, it was the twisted steel frames of the buildings which brought it back to mind, that and my Dad was a Chrysler/Mopar fan until the end of the fifties, and five terrible cars in that time-frame. Remember that the Japanese economy was still limping along and only slowly recovering from the war. And so a deal was made to allow low cost shipments of recycled steel to the states. This recycled steel came in large part from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, from the remains of the building frames and whatnot.

The recycling process was shown by test to remove the radioactivity but left the steel with a high iron content, with iron being a well known natural oxidizer. The largest users of steel were given special purchase rates, and Chrysler was at the front of he line for this low cost steel, and as a consequence its cars began to earn a reputation for poor corrosion resistance in the 1950s.

Remelted iron and steel returns to normal, without radiation, but it contained high levels of iron since the alloys were "siphoned" off or lost in the process; and adding nickel or chromium into the molten steel to resist oxidation was prevented due to cost. This was US government-subsidized imported steel project. Unfortunately, this subsidized steel was sold to the then-largest consumers of steel--the American automotive industry, and of the then "Big Three", it was Chrysler who really needed an inexpensive source of steel sheets. Chrysler bought the bulk of the recycled steel from Japan, and their reputation for quality from the fifties on suffered with many automotive historians and enthusiasts.

The use of that poor quality steel, along with the lack of rust resistance methods on the line, garnered Chrysler a poor reputation for corrosion and poor quality that lingered on long after that time frame.

Just a memory I had of his last Mopar (a '60 Dodge Matador) rusting away before his very eyes, and not being able to get any trade-in value at all on the first Pontiac he bought in the fall of '62. The Pontiac dealer told him he would give him $1000 off the price if he DIDN'T bring it onto his lot! So Dad bought the '63 Bonneville, and sold the two year old Dodge on the private market for $1200, and really got $2200 by doing it that way.

As for the radiation that the tanks might have absorbed at "ground zero" during the Trinity test, this might actually apply as well.

Atom bombs like the ones dropped on Japan produce two types of radiation: initial and residual. (I'm getting this from Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings, an exhaustive Japanese study, published in English in 1981.) Initial radiation is released by the explosion itself. Residual radiation comes later from radionuclides, radioactive isotopes either generated by the explosion or else induced in soil, building materials, bodies, etc, by neutron bombardment unleashed by the blast.

The bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki produced their share of residual radiation, but it didn't stick around long, for two reasons. First, both bombs were detonated more than 500 meters above street level so as to wreak maximum destruction (surrounding buildings would have blocked much of the force of ground-level explosions). That limited surface contamination, since most of the radioactive debris was carried off in the mushroom cloud instead of being embedded in the earth. There was plenty of lethal fallout in the form of "ashes of death" and "black rain," but it was spread over a fairly wide area.

Second, most of the radionuclides had brief half-lives--some lasting just minutes. The bomb sites were intensely radioactive for the first few hours after the explosions, but thereafter the danger diminished rapidly. American scientists sweeping Hiroshima with Geiger counters a month after the explosion to see if the area was safe for occupation troops found a devastated city but little radioactivity. Water lilies blackened by the blast had already begun to grow again, suggesting that whatever radioactivity there had been immediately following the blast had quickly dissipated.

U.S. military authorities touted these findings to an apprehensive world as proof that A-bombs really weren't so bad. A rumor widespread among Japanese civilians--evidently based on comments made by an American science writer in an interview published shortly after the bombings--held that Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be uninhabitable for 70 or 75 years.

To quell such talk, American military leaders held a press conference at which they suggested that the explosions had been massive but otherwise ordinary, denied any lingering danger, and predicted there would be no further deaths.

None of this turned out to be true. Although residual radiation was a relatively minor threat, many of those who survived the blasts had already absorbed the initial radiation doses that would eventually kill or cripple them. (neither the doom sayers nor the optomistic predictions were totally right)

Radiation deaths subsided after seven or eight weeks but latent effects continued to appear for a long time. Fetuses irradiated in the wombs of their mothers were subject to high rates of miscarriage, stillbirth, and birth defects--many kids were retarded or had unusually small heads (microcephaly), stunted growth, or other afflictions. Cases of leukemia surged in 1947 and peaked in the early 1950s. Additional problems included other cancers and blood disorders, cataracts, heavy scarring (keloid), and male sterility. However, no genetic damage was detected in children conceived after the blasts. Oddly enough, notwithstanding all the calamities visited on the Japanese by the bombs, the two things everybody now expects to happen in a nuclear war, mutant kids and the land glowing blue forevermore, didn't.

— Cecil Adams
　
Goto:

The Straight Dope: If nuclear fallout lasts thousands of years, how did Hiroshima and Nagasaki recover so quickly?

 

Another little teaser...this time from a US DOE handout at the National Atomic Museum published in 1994, is this little item regarding 'Jumbo';

"Unable to totally destroy Jumbo, the Army buried it in the desert, where it remained until 1951. It was not until the early 1970s that the impressive remains of Jumbo, still weighing over 180 tons, were moved to their present position near the entrance to Tinity Site."

This was after the Army blew off both ends of it by placing several 500 lbs bombs at one end.
So....was it actually buried? Or was the author just being figurative? If it HAD been buried, obviously where was known for it to be dug back up.
Wouldnt it still be likely that something that was radioactive at that time, and not as bulky, would probably also been buried onsite? If moved to a salvage yard at Kirtland, surely it would have been fenced off in order to cool down after having driven around on ground zero.

 

Yes, "Jumbo" would have been a real mistake if it had been used. You can see the reason they considered it, the plutonium was so precious at the time, as the production was just getting started they didn't want to "loose it" if the implossion idea was a dud. That way they would still have the plutonium for another attempt. Probably a "gun-type" instead of the "implossion". Good thing they didn't put the "gadget" in there, the schrapnel would have been deadly for miles around.

 

I just caught the end of a news snippit saying there was a clean-up going on at Los Alamos where they were wondering how big the objects might be that they may have to dig up in what I thought was a clean up of some early experiments. Who knows what may be buried there. You make fun of transformers but I grew up next to people who claimed larger than life insects were caused by nukes in New Mexico and they really believed this and were in great fear of those insects. Also did you know a couple of years ago when they were moving the nuclear museum to its new location they discovered one of the display bombs still contained an intact trigger? It had to be demilled.

 

I had heard about a clean up at Los Alamos as well. To add to the confusion, the area was also called 'Trinity Site' and consisted of several old buildings and I think a dump ditch.

I just dont know how contaminated something like a Sherman would be after grinding around on the trinitite at ground zero and what, if any, decon methods might have been attempted, considering the efforts used at Bikini a couple of years later and the lack of water at Trinity.

Would a priority have been to bring in a couple of tank transporters to haul out the Shermans? Or would they have been left in place along with other now useless test equipment? My first thoughts on this would be that the Shermans were left at the site at least until the first attempt at cleaning up the area around the crater, or when the trinitite was buried.

Would the current tank transporters of that day been able to load a Sherman with the additional lead weight installed? Seems like cutting a contaminated tank up would have been a real dirty job.

For that matter, WHERE were the Shermans converted for their test role? Were they modified and then transported in, similar to the way Jumbo was brought in? Or were all the modifications done at the site?

 

Minutes after making my last post, I found this on the 'Nukeworker.com' site in regarding a posting I had placed there. This is from Adam Grundleger;

"archived article from Sep 1945 stating that they were still at the base camp eight weeks later. All the material mentioned (labware, trinitite, a contaminated truck) was bulldozed into a trench and buried. I think it was trench B at T-21 or something similar. The trench was big enough from the aerial photos, but I haven't found any references to disposal."

 

A bit of news for those interested in this sort of thing...not dealing with the Shermans and Trinity, but something similar. Apparently the Australian Army had a Centurion tank at the Emu Field test site in Australia in 1953. It sat something like 500 yards from ground zero, left with its engine running. After the test it was found that it had been pushed 5 feet with its engine out of gas. It was scorched with its optics and lights sand blasted and topside gear carried away. Mantlet cover was burned off. Still, it was driven off the site under its own power. It was afterwards called 'The Atomic Tank' and following this event, later served in Vietnam!!!! The tank still exists at an army base in Australia.

 

Very interesting bongo.....I know from relatives accounts there could have been movement of those tanks quite undetected from trinity to Los Alamos as this state did not have a really large populace to watch in those days. Over the years there has been a lot more nuclear activity here and in Nevada than most people realize unless they spend some time studying each individual item. For example many feel John Wayne and others in the movie industry were exposed during some filming when nuclear clouds blew over(causing their cancers). Without a great deal of attention there were experiments like "Gasbuggy" to see what a nuke would do to a natural gas formation underground. How often do you think in following years that anybody tested natural gas for radiation when marketed? Also mining for the uranium that made the first bombs was done along the Animas River and was not cleaned up until the 70's so were people drinking water downstream after these tailings lined the river banks? Large communities did so. I think some people know the answers and choose not to talk much about this. They were making haste when they finally realized they needed to clean it up.

 

Well, what the scientist actually "knew" about radiation was pretty limited at the time, but there was a documentary on the Wayne and other actors cancers, and the costums they wore in Ghengis Khan (one of Wayne's worst) were still in storage. They were radiation tested and found to be clean except for the normal background radiation. Same with the sand they scooped up and took to Hollywood for indoor shoots.

The cancer rates in the little Utah town seemed abnormal at first, but when studied against other rates in areas which weren't exposed to the wind pattern, found to not be abnormal. The tests should have been more carefully monitored, the ruination of our environment by unregulated chemical industry and other fouling of our nest needed to be more closely monitored as well.

The lack of a corporation financed Superfund to pay for cleaning up these messes is deplorable.

 

Brndrt1,

As you rightly point out, the effects of radiation were not well understood.

A friend of mine led a company of Army Engineers in building Atomic Field at Nagasaki. It was located near ground zero. His unit also helped restore the water supply, and various other jobs during the months they were in Nagasaki. In later life he suffered for years from all sorts of diseases that are now known to be radiation related. Very sad and tragic.

Sorry, I just realized this is off-topic, and rather than lose it would ask the moderators to move it to the proper location.

Best,

Duckbill